Something a little less expensive than a Barracuda system would be the preferred method. We are waiting for a 'leg-up' from outside sales to get our budget going. Thank you for any input so that I may weigh the balance and come up with a preferred method from your comments.

There could be quite a few variables in this, but I'll ask some follow-up questions:

Do you just have one 2008R2 server? Is it a physical or virtual server? Also, what kind of window do you need to have to bring it up in result of a failure? (We need to be back up in less than an hour or so if one of our major servers crash).

If you don't need to get back online really, really fast, Windows Backup built into 2008R2 is always a good choice. As far as hardware, you can go with something along the lines of a NetGear ReadyNas for about 1500 bucks, or a lower-end drobo box.

If you haven't seen it (most people don't seem to even know about it) then take a look at MS Data Protection Manager (DPM). We use the 2007 version, and we've found it to be very straight forward, very robust.

You get disk to disk backups with disk to tape for greater resilience. It doesn't seem to cause too many issues on the servers, unlike other products, and recovery is very easy to do.

The built in wbadmin backup on 2008 and 2008R2 is amazing if you have a local USB drive (even drive rotations work). Does snapshots and a very easy BMR.

If you are virtual and/or need to backup to a NAS, then you will need to look at something more complex that will do differentials. WBAdmin does not do differential when backing up to a non-local drive.

1st Post

It's an interesting mix of an onsite NAS appliance with the option of syncing with a cloud based host (for a monthly fee) or what I prefer - pair it with their "Cloud Plug", which is an additional, inexpensive device that can be placed in an offsite location of your choosing. For my SMB clients we usually locate it at one of the owners homes. No recurring monthly fees, no need to take media offsite, and best of all, the cloud plug uses a standard USB hard drive with the NTFS file system (and backed up files are in their native format). In the event of a total server meltdown, the drive can be simply plugged in to any PC and files are easily recoverable. No waiting unpteen hours to obtain your files from the cloud!

I have several native backups that run. The only drawback is that it doesn't natively support multiple scheduled backups. No biggie though - just create them as scheduled tasks. Below is a sample of the script I use to perform a copy backup of several data locations to a network destination, via a copy backup.

What kind of recovery time are you looking for? If you require a rapid restore from any point, the ideal way would be to take image backups onsite and optionally have an offsite replication for redundancy.

StoreGrid's Disk Image backups and Bare Metal restores provide instant restores from multiple points including P2V (Physical to Virtual) and P2P (dissimilar hardware) migrations. StoreGrid can do an image backup of specific partition, drive or the entire machine. No additional add-ons or plugins are needed. During the incremental backups, only the changed image data with respect to the previous full backups is backed up thus saving space and time.

And also the licensing cost, which is very affordable, is only per client and the backup server and replication server are absolutely free.

Sorry for the confusion on this, are you able to take the backup contents and move it to another directory and extract it like the NTBackup data?

No problem. :) Assuming it's a Server 2008/R2 or Vista/7 machine, yes. You also need file permission access, depending on how it's set.

It works slightly differently due to the difference in backup process. You access it directly through explorer. By default it'll open the Backup program & show the versions available & you can then choose files, folders or everything. If you go through explorer all the way, it shows as split .zip files. It's a bugger trying to find things that way though.

If this question is for me (can't tell who it is directed to), it depends on how much data you have. The type a data makes a bit of a difference as well in terms of compression rate. Private message me for more details.

We have always recommended Symantec Backup Exec. The cost will greatly depend on what you are backing up. If you need the SQL agent or the Exchange agent, it becomes pricey. If you were in an SBS environment, the Backup Exec becomes very cost effective. How much data you are backing up will determine what to backup to. We use removable SATA cartridges for most single server environments. We also have multiple server environments backing up with Backup Exec to LTO3.

If you could provide some details on the configuration and amount of data to backup, we can give you more appropriate recomendations.

In my mind, D2D2Off-site is always the way to go. If you have a local NAS target which can handle your jobs, mount a share and use the native backup tools. Most good NAS appliances have native replication to another box (rsync or the like) so you can eventually get another one at another location for DR purposes.